Research

The main research focus of Dr. Laura Marie Schons is to explore the responsibilities of corporations and consumers in society as well the respective reactions of stakeholders to the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities of companies. Thereby, her work is characterized by a strong empirical orientation: using qualitative as well as quantitative methods she analyzes data on firm-, customer-, and employee level. Her main interest lies in the search for answers to the question how corporations can do business in responsible ways in the face of altered stakeholder expectations and globalized market structures. For this purpose, she examines the balanced consideration of diverse interests of company-internal and external stakeholders and whether corporations actually “walk their talk”, i.e., whether they live up to the promises they make in terms of responsibility. Moreover, she is interested in the question whether consumers can be seen as responsible for the negative consequences incurred by their consumption choices and how consumers can be effectively persuaded to adopt more sustainable consumption patterns. Thus, her research interests can be broken down into the two fields of corporate and consumer responsibility (please see Figure below).